Parapsychology

• 1. Introduction

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  Parapsychology is the scientific study of phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and near-death experiences. In 1882, a group of philosophers, scholars, and politicians gathered in London to form the Society for Psychical Research, the first organized body to investigate paranormal claims through scientific inquiry. Among its early members were Nobel Laureates Charles Richet and Henri Bergson, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, and the statesman Arthur Balfour. Their ambition was to bring the rigor of academic discipline to questions that most of mainstream science refused to touch.

  For over a century, parapsychologists have run hundreds of thousands of trials, filled journals with data, and split with universities, governments, and one another over the meaning of their results. They have employed decks of cards with simple symbols, electronic random number generators, hypnosis chambers, and the careful measurement of brain activity during moments of supposed psychic transmission. And yet, after more than a hundred years of formal research, the scientific consensus remains that no reproducible evidence for the existence of any psychic phenomenon has ever been established.

  What draws people to the field despite that verdict? And why has so much of the evidence, when examined closely, dissolved into fraud, sensory leakage, or statistical noise? Those questions run through the entire history of parapsychology, from the card experiments at Duke University to the U.S. government’s classified remote-viewing program.

• 2. Naming the Unknown

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  The word parapsychology was coined in 1889 by the German philosopher Max Dessoir, who built it from the Greek prefix para, meaning alongside, and the familiar word psychology. It sat largely unused for decades until J. B. Rhine adopted it in the 1930s as a deliberate replacement for the older phrase psychical research. Rhine’s choice signaled a shift: he wanted laboratory experiments and quantitative method, not parlor-room séances.

  Running alongside that terminological history is the word psi, the technical label parapsychologists use for whatever unknown factor might underlie extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. Biologist Bertold Wiesner coined the term, and psychologist Robert Thouless first used it publicly in a 1942 article published in the British Journal of Psychology. Psi is drawn from the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet, which is also the first letter of the Greek word psyche, meaning mind or soul. The Parapsychological Association divides psi into two sub-categories: psi-gamma for extrasensory perception and psi-kappa for psychokinesis.

  In popular culture the word drifted further still, becoming nearly synonymous with extraordinary mental powers more broadly. That drift has made the academic use harder to pin down and has contributed to public confusion about what, exactly, parapsychologists claim to be investigating.

• 3. The Duke Laboratory

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  Stanford University became the first academic institution in the United States to study extrasensory perception in a laboratory setting in 1911. The effort was led by psychologist John Edgar Coover and funded by Thomas Welton Stanford, brother of the university’s founder. After roughly 10,000 experiments, Coover found that statistical analysis of the data revealed no cause beyond chance.

  Two decades later, Duke University took up the investigation under psychologist William McDougall, with J. B. Rhine and Louisa E. Rhine among the researchers. Rather than seeking the qualitative evidence that earlier psychical researchers had favored, the Duke team used cards and dice to generate hard numbers. Rhine and associate Karl Zener developed a test deck containing five possible symbols. A score significantly above 20 percent correct was treated as evidence for psychic ability. Rhine reported in his 1934 book Extrasensory Perception that after 90,000 trials he felt ESP was an actual and demonstrable occurrence.

  Skeptics at other institutions tried to replicate the work and consistently failed. W. S. Cox from Princeton University ran 25,064 trials with 132 subjects and concluded there was no evidence of extrasensory perception in any individual or group tested, attributing the discrepancy with Rhine’s results to uncontrollable experimental factors or differences in subjects. Rhine’s experiments were eventually discredited on the grounds that sensory leakage or cheating could account for all his results: subjects could read symbols from the backs of cards, or pick up subtle cues from the experimenter’s voice and behavior. Illusionist Milbourne Christopher later wrote that he could identify at least a dozen ways a subject wishing to cheat could have deceived Rhine under the conditions he described.

  When Rhine responded to criticism by tightening controls, his high-scoring subjects disappeared. Chemist Irving Langmuir raised a further objection: Rhine had not reported the scores of subjects he suspected of guessing wrong deliberately, which would have inflated his statistics. Rhine’s own 1937 book New Frontiers of the Mind brought these disputed findings to a general audience, and Rhine went on to found the Journal of Parapsychology, which he co-edited with McDougall.

• 4. Fraud in the Laboratory

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  In 1881, Eleanor Sidgwick of the Society for Psychical Research exposed the fraudulent methods used by spirit photographers including Édouard Isidore Buguet, Frederic Hudson, and William H. Mumler. That pattern of exposure continued across the following century, but it was not limited to mediums and photographers working outside established institutions.

  In 1974, Walter J. Levy, who was J. B. Rhine’s own successor as director of the Institute for Parapsychology, was caught altering data. Levy had conducted experiments involving computer-controlled manipulation of non-human subjects, including rats, and reported very high positive results. Fellow researchers grew suspicious of his methods and found that he had manually interfered with the data-recording equipment to generate fraudulent strings of positive outcomes. Levy confessed and resigned.

  The same year, Rhine published a paper in the Journal of Parapsychology documenting twelve cases of fraud he had personally detected among his own researchers between 1940 and 1950. He refused to name any of those researchers, which meant that an unknown number of articles claiming paranormal effects remained in the published literature without correction. Martin Gardner later claimed that files from Rhine’s laboratory contained evidence suggesting fraud by one of Rhine’s most prominent subjects, Hubert Pearce, noting that Pearce was never able to score above chance when anyone other than the experimenter was watching.

  George Albert Smith and Douglas Blackburn had been presented by the Society for Psychical Research as genuine telepaths in the late nineteenth century. Blackburn eventually confessed that the entire series of experiments had been staged, writing that the two young men had wanted to show how easily men of scientific training could be deceived when seeking evidence for a theory they wished to establish. In 1979, magician James Randi engineered a deliberate hoax, sending two young magicians undercover to a university laboratory where they fooled researchers into believing they had paranormal powers for three years, demonstrating, Randi argued, the depth of methodological credulity in the field.

• 5. Government and the Stargate Project

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  Beginning in the early 1950s, the CIA started extensive research into behavioral engineering. The findings from that program eventually led to the creation of the Stargate Project, which handled ESP research for the U.S. federal government and was partly conducted under contract by researchers at SRI International and Science Applications International Corporation.

  Physicist Russell Targ coined the term remote viewing in 1974 to describe experiments he was conducting at the Stanford Research Institute, in which subjects attempted to describe distant or hidden targets using only their minds. Several hundred trials were carried out over the following decades. Psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Targ and Harold Puthoff’s remote viewing experiments from the 1970s and could not. Investigating the original procedure, Marks and Kammann found that the notes given to judges in those experiments contained clues about the sequence in which sessions had been carried out, such as references to yesterday’s targets or dates written at the top of pages. They concluded that those cues, not genuine remote perception, accounted for the high hit rates. Marks was able to achieve perfect accuracy himself simply by using the embedded cues, without visiting any target site.

  The Stargate Project was terminated in 1995. The official conclusion was that it had never produced information that was useful in any intelligence operation. The data generated had been vague and laden with irrelevant and erroneous material. There was also reason to suspect that the project’s research managers had adjusted their reports to match known background information rather than reporting genuinely independent psychic impressions.

• 6. The Ganzfeld Experiments

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  The Ganzfeld technique, whose name is German for whole field, was developed to reduce mental noise by providing mild, unpatterned stimuli to the visual and auditory senses. In a typical session, a receiver lies in a reclined position with half ping-pong balls placed over the eyes, bathed in soft red light, and listens to white noise through headphones. A separate sender views a video clip or image and attempts to transmit it mentally. After a sending period of roughly 20 to 40 minutes, the receiver is shown four images and asked to identify which was the actual target.

  Ray Hyman examined 42 Ganzfeld experiments and discovered flaws in every single one. He organized the problems into twelve categories, six concerning statistical defects and six covering procedural issues including inadequate randomization, documentation failures, and possibilities of sensory leakage. Over half of the studies he reviewed had failed to safeguard against sensory leakage, such as receivers hearing sounds from the adjacent sender’s room because walls were not soundproof. Charles Honorton, a sympathetic researcher, agreed that the 42 studies could not support a claim for psi.

  A later analysis by Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di Risio examined 29 Ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008. Of 1,498 trials, 483 produced hits, a rate of 32.2 percent that was statistically significant with a p-value below .001. Hyman published a rebuttal in 2010 arguing that relying on meta-analysis as the sole basis for claiming a replicable anomaly was fallacious and that the Ganzfeld studies had not been independently replicated. A further analysis by Rouder and colleagues in 2013 concluded that critical evaluation of that meta-analysis revealed no evidence for psi, no plausible mechanism, and a pattern of omitted replication failures.

• 7. Physics and the Problem of Psi

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  Psychokinesis, the alleged ability of the mind to influence matter, violates several well-established principles of physics. Physicist Sean M. Carroll has noted that both human brains and the physical objects people attempt to move with their minds are composed, like all matter, of quarks and leptons, which interact through only four known forces: strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational. Any new force capable of producing psychokinesis over a range greater than one millimeter would need to be at most a billionth the strength of gravity, or it would already have appeared in existing experiments. No such force has been detected.

  Physicist John G. Taylor wrote that any hypothetical fifth force causing psychokinesis would need to transmit enough energy to overcome the electromagnetic forces binding atoms together. That force would have to act on atoms all the time, not just during claimed paranormal occurrences. Taylor found no scientific trace of any such force down to many orders of magnitude and concluded that psychokinesis is in complete contradiction to established science.

  Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, known as PEAR, ran psychokinesis studies using random number generators for 28 years before closing in February 2007. Founder Robert G. Jahn and colleague Brenda Dunne acknowledged that the effect they observed was very small and not significant enough to be detected over any brief experimental run. Two independent German scientific groups failed to replicate the PEAR results. Physicist Robert L. Park described PEAR as an embarrassment to science and an embarrassment for Princeton. A meta-analysis of 380 psychokinesis studies published in Psychological Bulletin reported an overall positive effect that was statistically significant but very small relative to sample size and consistent with publication bias as an explanation.

• 8. A Century Without Replication

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  The U.S. National Academy of Sciences published a report in 1988 concluding that 130 years of research had produced no scientific justification for the existence of parapsychological phenomena. A panel commissioned by the U.S. National Research Council reached a similar conclusion, finding that a large body of the best available evidence simply did not support the existence of extrasensory perception, mental telepathy, or mind over matter.

  James Alcock, professor of psychology at York University, argued in a 2003 paper that parapsychologists effectively never take seriously the possibility that psi does not exist. When experiments fail, researchers invoke explanations such as the psi-experimenter effect rather than treating failure as evidence against the hypothesis. Alcock described the situation plainly: parapsychology is, at bottom, motivated by belief in search of data, rather than data in search of explanation.

  In January 2008, a study using neuroimaging designed specifically to provide favorable conditions for detecting telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognition found no distinguishable neuronal responses between psychic and non-psychic stimuli. The researchers described their findings as the strongest evidence yet obtained against the existence of paranormal mental phenomena. Chris French, a psychologist not personally convinced that parapsychology has demonstrated psi, has nonetheless argued that parapsychological experiments still follow the scientific method and should not be dismissed entirely. French acknowledged that his is the minority view among critics of the field, and that after more than a century of systematic research, the wider scientific community remains unconvinced. The University of Edinburgh’s Koestler Parapsychology Unit remains one of the active academic centers still pursuing the question.